Tri-fold Brochure: NPS Online
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Audience
For this piece, the audience is distance students, most of who are not immediately on a degree path but rather interested in certificates or individual courses that could lead to a degree at a later time. They are military and federal civilian employees, usually in their late 20’s to mid 30’s, and have dramatically varying backgrounds.
Rationale
“NPS Online” was, at the time, the central point for all web-based distributed learning activities at NPS. All distributed students were directed to the website for information on programs, courses, and certificate opportunities. When this piece was developed, each of the certificate programs had a hard copy brochure that could be handed out to interested students, but there were no hard copy marketing materials for the initiative as a whole. All students were directed to the website for some basic information that, I felt, could be included in another hard copy brochure.
Outside - Front panel: The title “NPS Online” highly contrasts the rest of the piece with size and the drop shadow. The color of the title is the same as the border around the image in order to give it repetition. I felt it needed something to bring it back in with the rest of the brochure since it was so large and the “NPS” font was not used anywhere else. The light blue rectangles are the same color used throughout the piece. They align the “The Naval Postgraduate School” text with the image, the edge of the “NPS Online” text, and the “n” of “Online”.
Outside - "Masters Programs", "Courses Offered": The watermarked acronyms for the programs are repeated from the inside and the color of the font is the same as the header bar. The watermark highly contrasts with the text and the subhead text. The “Courses Offered” has strong repetition with the triangle bullet and the bold italic course titles and provides a firm left edge to the page with the left alignment.
Inside: The left alignment of almost everything gives a firm definition to the edge of the panel. For example, the “Student Info Form” has the head title and the content all aligned. The subheads are to the left to provide enough contrast between each section.
Interest was expressed in using this piece in the format presented, but it was ultimately rejected in favor of using the website as the primary source of information.
Information Design: NPS Fiscal Year 2004 Global Programs
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Audience
The audience for this project consists of stakeholders who are concerned with or need to know the extent of activities for the Naval Postgraduate School worldwide.
Rationale
Not only does NPS have students come from all across the world to Monterey for resident studies, NPS also sends faculty to locations around the world. It is important to be able to clearly and concisely show the extent of these activities. This map is used in briefings for higher-ups to relate this information in several minutes at most.
When revising this piece, I changed my approach significantly. I had been using the most complex map that we had done up to this point. I decided that it was much more appropriate to not let the exception define the approach to the piece. This map typically includes only a handful of countries rather than the dozens in the most complex version. The countries used for this version were the most current for this project at the time it was developed.
I chose the same color scheme and fonts as I used in the trifold brochure for consistency. This color scheme gave me enough contrast for everything to be visible, even in grayscale.
I chose to have each continent in its own square. Because much of some of the continents were irrelevant, I scaled a simplified outline of the continent in the background to balance recognition and relevance to the active countries. The size of the PDF dropped from 2.8 MB to 209 KB, mostly due to simplifying the continents and including only the relevant active countries. I felt that placing the outline of the country with a small stroke below the active countries with a larger stroke and fill were enough for a sense of depth. I had originally used drop shadows on the countries for depth, but I removed them for what I felt was a better and more simplified approach that also resulted in a less complex and smaller file.
This concept was not used in favor of maintaining consistency with the previous concept.
Job aid: Connecting a laptop to the Kn154 conference room monitor
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Audience
The audience for this project consists of staff of my department. I originally had considered guests but there are too many variables to declare them a primary audience.
Rationale
I am currently the main source of support for people attempting to connect their computers to the various projectors and monitors in our rooms. A job aid to help people get started is a definite need, as many people ask the same questions continually.
I wanted to do a job aid that was predominantly iconographic and did not rely on text elements. I have learned that instructional designers are notorious for not reading directions and wanted to try something that they could scan quickly. I compromised with my original concept and added enough text to clarify what might not be readily apparent in the piece. There were some liberties I was able to take because this job aid will be posted on the wall next to the conference table and monitor.
We rarely do anything this vivid and this type of “colorful” in the office. I made design decisions with a slightly aggressive, technology-oriented, and a fun/youthful concept in mind. The typefaces I used were to solidify the technology theme of the piece. Contrast was a strong consideration during the revision of this piece and the most apparent result of that are the colors used. The stroke on all the fonts helped to increase the contrast between the font color and the color of whatever background they are on, as well as adding a repetitive element. By breaking up the piece onto two pages and changing the orientation of the page from portrait to landscape, I was able to increase the size of all elements and increase the contrast of the elements from one another with the use of white space.
This piece is currently used in our office in this exact format and has been very successful.
Flyer: IT1234 - Introduction to Information Technology course
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Audience
For this piece, I used the information for a real NPS course but substituted a fictional course ID (IT1234). This course is one offered at the Naval Postgraduate School across several curricula. It is an introductory course that students usually take in their first quarter of their programs. The audience consists of military and federal civilian employees. They are usually in their late 20’s to mid 30’s and have dramatically varying backgrounds.
Rationale
Many courses will have promotional flyers created for them. The rationale of this piece is not to bring in students that would not normally attend the class but instead to define a visual theme for the class. This would be used as a cover page for the course information (syllabus, schedule, etc) handouts, both electronic and hard copy. Elements used in this initial piece would be used throughout the other course materials.
I wanted to gain the attention and pull someone into the piece. I used highly contrasting elements, such as color with the white “IT1234” and the black band background and the size of the “IT1234” compared to the other elements on the page. The course title is gray to contrast it and the “IT1234”. The course title is repeated to add to the symmetry of the piece. I wanted to get a very symmetrical feel to it so as many elements that could be repeated as possible were repeated. I tried some subtle repetition with the image. The part of the image appearing in the top left corner is the bottom right of the image and vice versa.
This specific concept was not used for this course, but was applied in various forms for other course development activities.
Instructional Video: An Overview of the Inside of a Computer
Audience
The audience for this video is the same as the IT1234 course in the flyer above. These students are fully distributed and all at a distance. Some students are gathered in groups, but it is not uncommon for every student in the class to be at a different physical location.
Rationale
This instructional video was a prototype for several instructors who were developing distributed introductory computer science courses. In face-to-face environments, they would walk into the lab and start physically disassembling a computer and work with students to do the same. With students spread quite literally all across the world, an appropriate method of addressing this instructional issue was with video.
Many of the students have poor and intermittent Internet access. Therefore, an expectation of this to be presented online was deemed unreasonable and impractical. The prototype was presented as a DVD to be mailed to students along with their textbooks. A DVD was chosen as the format because it had the highest possible quality, it could be mailed to the students at the same time as their textbooks and other materials, the content would not change or be updated regularly, all students had access to a DVD player and television or had a DVD capable computer, and it could be easily navigated.
This portfolio contains Macromedia Flash versions for the greatest chance of compatibility and lower file size.
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